West Bengal may not be the lawless hell depicted by Trinamul leader Mamata Banerjee, but state home minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya is not telling the whole truth when he says there is less crime here than in other states.
Both have politicised law and order to a point where the Centre and the state are embroiled in a fruitless wrangle over constitutional proprieties. Last week, a Union home ministry fact-finding team, led by additional home secretary P.D. Shenoy, got little out of a hostile state administration. Chief secretary Manish Gupta even reminded the team that law and order was a state subject. The Left leadership made it plain that while it had played ball with a visiting BJP MPs' team on the same issue only days ago, the home ministry side was not exactly welcome. "Let the team come and rest awhile in Calcutta before returning to Delhi," said CPI(M) central committee member Biman Basu.
How bad is law and order in Bengal? There is no doubt that it has deteriorated, but observers are divided in their assessment. Mamata wants nothing less than President's rule. But Congress leader Ghani Khan Choudhury says that's going a bit far. Another Congress leader, Manas Bhuyan, feels the state police is a spent force. "On an average over 2,000 murders are committed and only 120 cases or so are being probed. Politically favoured police officers are more interested in attending poetry sessions than combating crime."
Even the Left Front allies are complaining. Jayanta Biswas, member of the CPI(M) ally RSP, told the state assembly that policemen these days survived only on bribes. Another RSP member described CPI(M) men involved in the killing of five RSP men at Basanti, in South 24 Parganas, recently as "butchers" and refrained from voting in favour of the government on a motion.
Bhattacharya's arguments to silence the visiting BJP team exposed the weakness of the official claims about law and order. He criticised Shanta Kumar and others for visiting areas where the CPI(M) had attacked others, but not those where it had been attacked. An admission that violence hadn't abated after the panchayat polls. The state home minister did concede that a section of police officers was corrupt, but did not say what he would do about this, apart from announcing a few transfers.
Meanwhile, mob violence continues to nag the government. A student was brutally killed in Howrah after a minor accident; a lady was molested by criminals on a train from Assam for standing up to smugglers; and hooligans burnt a bus—43 buses were burnt in 36 months—on a Calcutta street in front of police officers.
The police say they are hamstrung by political pressures. Says one DCP: "Even as we make an arrest, some leader or the other straightaway phones our superiors." Others point out that Jyoti Basu himself had ranted against a junior officer for observing sound pollution rules during elections, and later had him transferred.
